For most people, the sport of fishing uses a line, a rod, and a lure or bait with a hook embedded in the lure or bait. The line is usually attached to the rod. The bait is allowed to fall onto or into the water where fish are believed to be waiting in hopes that a fish will mistake the bait or lure for food, bite it, and be snagged by the hook embedded in the bait. The line may be then used to pull the fish from the water and the process repeated.
For some people, fishing still consists largely of that basic activity with a cane pole, a line, a float, a hook, and a store of earth worms to be used for bait. However, at an extreme end, deep sea sport fishermen have a 60 or 70 foot ocean-going boat, sometimes costing over $10 million, with complicated electronics, radar, sonar, GPS systems, outriggers, and with rod-and-reel and line combinations that retail for well over a thousand dollars each. Fly fishing is one fishing method, albeit one of the most difficult to master. Fly fishing is probably the oldest form of sport fishing dating back to the third century C.E. Bait casting and spin casting are more recent forms of sport fishing being respectively around 150 years old and 75 years old.
In conventional spinning rods and reels and bait casting rods and reels, the weight of the lure is used, along with the rod, to throw the lure into an area where the fish is believed to be. Throwing the lure is not unlike throwing any other object, like a baseball or a rock, but the motion is aided by a rod to extend the arc of the throwing motion. In fly fishing, one uses a relatively long, flexible rod, and relatively heavy line that is stored on a reel. At one end of that line a lighter line or leader is tied to the heavy line. The light line or leader terminates in a very lightweight, usually artificial, fly which is designed to look like some fly or prey found in nature which forms part of the food of a particular sport fish or predator, like rainbow trout or salmon. The bait or fly is presented by using a relatively heavy line. It is the line that is cast or thrown and the lightweight fly at the end of the line moves only because the line itself moves. In short, in bait or spin casting the lure is thrown and the line goes along for the ride, while in fly casting the line is thrown and the lure goes along for the ride.
Ordinarily, fly casting requires longer rods for most efficiency. While casting, the fly reel serves only as a line storage device. The fisherman, in using a fly rod and reel, pulls the fly line from the reel as the cast is being made. A cast is made by executing the rod to move the entire length of line to be cast in the air forwards and backwards, usually, sometimes adding line in each repetition until an appropriate length of line is in play, then using the rod to deliver the line and the terminal fly to the water. A very experienced and skillful fisherman using a bait or spin casting reel, especially ones designed for surf fishing, can cast a several-ounce lure hundreds of feet with accuracy. However, in fly fishing most casts are between 20 and 60 feet with casts over 100 feet rare and requiring good equipment and extraordinary skill.
Because of these and other differences, fly fishing has largely diverged from spin or bait casting. First, one can learn to cast using a spinning or bait casting equipment very quickly. Even a child can be taught in a few minutes to use the equipment well enough to be able to fish with it. Equipment can be bought at a variety store for spinning or bait casting for as little as $20 and rarely is it necessary to spend over $200 to obtain a good rod-and-reel combination. For these reasons, it may be thought that bait and spin casting is a relative utilitarian sport with the goal of catching fish being primary in the minds of most fishermen.
On the other hand, fly fishing has developed to focus more on the sport of the process and less on the outcome. First, it is far more difficult to learn to cast a fly line than it is to use a spinning reel and rod. Second, the equipment ordinarily is substantially more expensive. As in any sport, there is inexpensive equipment, but even an adequate fly rod usually costs several hundred dollars. When one adds the other equipment that is ordinarily used, including reels and lines, it is difficult to obtain an adequate amount of equipment for moderate success at fly fishing for much less than $1000. Producing appropriately tied flies to be used with fly casting is virtually an art in itself with many of the flies being not only useable to catch fish, but valuable as works of craftsmanship in themselves. The divergence between these two types of sport fishing has resulted in fly fishing being much more oriented toward the process of presenting the fly appropriately than the outcome of catching fish for the table.
Part of the reason for the divergence in the two disciplines is that the very skills that make one good at casting a lure using a spinning rod or a bait casting rod do not help one cast a fly using fly fishing equipment. Indeed, the very motions that are required for one are counterproductive in the other. Therefore, an experienced spin casting or bait casting fisherman who wants to learn to fly fish must first forget, or at least ignore, the skills that he or she has developed for spin or bait casting. Consequently, teaching an angler to learn to fly fish is a difficult and demanding task. Throwing a lure attached to a spinning or bait casting rod-and-reel is not all that unlike just throwing the lure. One only need to learn to use the rod for the extra arc of motion and energy that it gives and to learn to release the line so that it will freely flow off the reel as the lure is thrown. On the other hand, a fly cast is far more complicated and far less intuitive. What is being thrown is not the lightweight fly at the end of the line, but the line itself. The rod is usually longer and more flexible than a bait casting or spin casting rod. To some degree, the weight of the line is used to throw the line but, perhaps more importantly, the loading and unloading of the rod is used to impart a wave motion to the line. The wave motion in the line greatly increases the efficiency of this fly cast and makes it possible to cast the still relatively lightweight line, albeit heavier than spinning or bait casting line, a substantial distance with great accuracy.
A difficulty in teaching fly fishing is the space required to practice. If one wishes to make a 50-foot cast, then one needs close to 50 feet of clear space behind one because the line extends behind as part of the cast and then 50 clear feet in front of one for the cast to take place. Moreover, because the fly casting line is relatively expensive and can be easily abraded by rough surfaces, one should not do it in a paved or gravel parking lot. Ideally, one would have this amount of open water available or, at least one would need a grassy area of this size. In urban areas there are very few open grassy spaces of a hundred feet in size that are readily available that are not already being used by children for play or by older children or adults for sports. Fly casting practice and soccer practice cannot coexist on the same field. Consequently, urban dwellers who wish to practice their fly casting are frequently relegated to doing so at unusual hours or in unusual places.
There are devices proposed to provide a target plate for someone practicing fly casting for accuracy. For example, O'Brien U.S. Pat. No. 5,297,355 uses a target with a steel leader to complete an electrical connection to give an indication when the target is hit, as well as to keep a record of hits over a given time period. Halterman, U.S. Pat. No. 5,678,351 proposes a device to be used with a spin or bait casting equipment which enables the angler to cast a lure or fly ordinarily only castable with fly casting equipment. Various types of throwing rods with an attached object or ball at the end are used for games. These devices are not unlike a casting rod but with a lure unconnected to any line. An example of these can be seen in Hayman, U.S. Pat. No. 5,129,650, Woolard, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,794,905, and 4,364,371. A variation of this rod-and-ball construction can be used as a golf swing training device where a shaft has a grip at one end with a weight member at the other end with a user gripping the grip and swinging the shaft like a golf club (see Staples, U.S. Pat. No. 3,897,068). However, none of these devices in any way can be used or adopted to be used to teach the appropriate motion required for a successful presentation of a line in a fly cast.
Consequently, it would be an advance in the art to have a device that could be readily attached to a fly rod. The device should give immediate feedback when an appropriate motion is made by the one using the fly rod so that an appropriate casting motion by the user will result in a particular outcome while an inappropriate motion will result in a completely different outcome. The device should be simple, easily constructed, inexpensive, and fit onto an existing fly rod that the user already has. It is an advantage if the device could be used with only a portion of the fly rod so that one could even practice the motion with a portion of the fly rod usually four to five feet in length, in an enclosed indoor space, such as a den or even an office at lunch time.